down; then they hoisted their sister-in-law into
the branches and told her to throw down the flowers to them. But while
she was in the tree, they tied thorns round the trunk so that she could
not descend and then left her to starve. After she had been in the tree
a long time, her brothers passed that way on their return journey,
and sat down under the tree to rest; the girl was too weak to speak
but she cried and her tears fell on the back of her eldest brother,
and he looked up and saw her; then they rescued her and revived her
and listened to her story; and they were very angry and vowed to
have revenge. So they gave their sister some needles and put her in a
sack and put the sack on one of the pack-bullocks. And when they got
home, they took the sack off gently and told their wives to carry it
carefully inside the house, and on no account to put it down. But when
the wives took it up, the girl inside pricked them with the needles so
that they screamed and let the sack fall. Their husbands scolded them
and made them take it up again, and they had to carry it in, though
they were pricked till the blood ran down. Then the brothers enquired
about all that had happened in their absence, and at last asked after
their sister, and their wives said that she had gone to the jungle
with some friends to get firewood. But the brothers turned on them and
told how they had found her in the _machunda_ tree and had brought her
home in the sack, and their wives were dumbfounded. Then the brothers
said that they had made a vow to dig a well and consecrate it; so they
set to work to dig a well two fathoms across and three fathoms deep;
and when they reached water, they fixed a day for the consecration;
and they told their wives to put on their best clothes and do the
_cumaura_ (betrothal) ceremony at the well. So the wives went to the
well, escorted by drummers, and as they stood in a row round the well,
each man pushed his own wife into it and then they covered the well
with a wooden grating and kept them in it for a whole year and at
the end of the year they pulled them out again.

* * * * *

Another version of this story gives three other tasks preliminary to
those given above and begins as follows:--

Once upon a time there was a girl named Hira who had seven
brothers. The brothers went away to a far country to trade leaving
her alone in the house with their wives; these seven sisters-in-law